Video: The Color Management options

In this exercise, I'm going to show you the last of the Print dialog box settings, the ones that control Color Management and Flattener Settings, and flattening is what Illustrator has to do to certain complex objects in order to make them conform to be PostScript printing standard. I am going to go up to the File menu, choose the Print command once again, Ctrl+P, Command+P, are your keyboard shortcuts. Inside the big Printer dialog box, I'll go ahead and switch to the Color Management option right there. We can see that my Document Profile, this is a CMYK document, and the profile is U.S. Web Coated (SWOP)v2, and we specified that when we setup our color settings way, way back at the beginning of this series.

Adobe Illustrator has long been a popular vector–based drawing program, but for many the learning curve is steep. In Illustrator CS4 One-on-One: Fundamentals, author and leading industry expert Deke McClelland shows users how to get in to the Illustrator mindset and overcome this learning curve. He covers the application's key features in a new way, making it simple and easy to master Illustrator. Deke teaches viewers how to use the core drawing and shape tools, the transformation and reshaping features, text, and the Pen tool. He also explains how to export and print. Even if learning Illustrator has been a struggle in the past, this training can help make sense of it. Exercise files accompany the course.

The Color Management options

In this exercise, I'm going to show you the last of the Print dialog boxsettings, the ones that control Color Management and Flattener Settings, andflattening is what Illustrator has to do to certain complex objects in order tomake them conform to be PostScript printing standard.I am going to go up to the File menu, choose the Print command once again,Ctrl+P, Command+P, are your keyboard shortcuts. Inside the big Printer dialogbox, I'll go ahead and switch to the Color Management option right there.We can see that my Document Profile, this is a CMYK document, and the profileis U.S. Web Coated (SWOP)v2, and we specified that when we setup our colorsettings way, way back at the beginning of this series.

So that's to be expected.Now it's possible that your printer, your commercial printer uses a differentprofile and if they give you a different profile, and they tell you they wantyou to use it, then by all means, you should use it, they will tell you howload it as well, when we presume.Let's say that I know for whatever reason that U.S. Sheetfed Uncoated v2 waswhat I needed to use. Well, then I get this checkbox right here which is askingme, okay, what do you want to do? Do you want to go ahead and convert the CMYKcolors so that they look right, so that you are maintaining the same visualappearance that you are seeing on your screen or that you are potentiallyproofing to a local device, or do you want to turn-off Preserve CMYK colors,and do you just want to stick with the CMYK colors you specified and hope for the best?That is entirely up to you, you are going to see different results, possiblybetter results one way or the other. I hate to be that vague about it but it'svery likely that you decide a specific CMYK colors for a region. You may havebeen working with a color booklet, for example, and you may have been pickingcolors out of that booklet and use those colors and you want to stick withthose CMYK values in which case, turn this checkbox off.

If you are unsure and you are thinking well, maybe I'll just let Illustrator doits thing and convert the colors, and hope that they will continue to lookbetter, and you want to place your faith in Illustrator, why then turn thischeckbox on? It's completely up to you right there.Now this Color Handling option, right now, we are letting Illustrator todetermine the colors, if we are using a PostScript Printer, a real PostScriptPrinter, then it's possible, we could let PostScript to handle, the colorconversions. But since I don't have an actual PostScript printer to work with,my only option is to let Illustrator determine the colors.

Now another situation you can run into when you are trying to output colorshere is that you are working with a Color Composite printer, let's trysomething else other than this Adobe PDF.Let's say we work with this Upstairs LDC printer. Now, I don't even know whatkind of printer it is. I actually do, but let's see we don't know what kind ofprinter it is, and I don't know whether it's a color printer or a black and white printer.When I choose it, I'll know because Printer Profile will give me a hint.It must be black and white because I'm seeing Dot Gain. I'm not seeing any of thecolor options. Notice these are all grayscale options that are available to me here.

So it's just telling me, well, do you think you are going to experience a DotGain of 10%, which is just a little bit dot gain, meaning things are just goingto go a little bit darker on your printer, or is it more like a Dot Gain of20%, what have you? This is the way it works.If your artwork is printing too dark, then you want to up the amount of dotgain and that's going to lighten up your artwork. If it's printing too light,then you want to reduce the amount of dot gain and that's going to darken yourartwork. And that's what black and white printers, once again, not necessarilythe best way to print a hyper saturated color document like this one. In fact,most grayscale printers are going to make all the reds virtually black, justsomething to bear in mind there.

Now what about the other printers here I have got this HP 1310 and I have thisthing called Studio Printer. I'll choose Studio Printer and it must be a colorprinter because it's offering me a Print Profile of Adobe RGB.Now this may seem weird that a printer is offering me an RGB profile, butthat's the way it works with Composite printers, or Inkjet printers, or yourLaser printers, because their print drivers are setup to automatically convertfrom the RGB space, your screen space after all to whatever inks the printeruses, and they could be all over the map. They are not going to be necessarilyCMYK, as we think of them traditionally, they could be any variations.

So you just need to specify what your RGB space is going to be, more likely tonote, I would recommend SRGB, this guy right there with the mess of letters andnumbers afterwards, because most printers are set up by default to work from the SRGB space.Then this Rendering Intent becomes very important by the way, not only do youlet Illustrator determine the colors because again, I don't have any otheroption. Unless it's a PostScript Printer, I'm going to be able to do anythingdifferent. But the Rendering Intent becomes very important.You have four different rendering intents available to you, only two of which I recommend, Relative Colorimetric and Perceptual. Saturation is designed tocreate hyper-vivid graphics for business presentations.

So possibly you are going to PowerPoint with your illustration, in which case,maybe you do one Saturation. I have never had any use for it but we also haveAbsolute Colorimetric.Absolute Colorimetric is going to basically ignore the white point of theoutput device, the colors are going to be as good as they can but those thatare exceeding the printer's capability is going to end up looking pretty bad.They could end up getting clipped, so lot of colors out there in the parameterend up becoming one.Relative Colorimetric is a better bet. If you are going to go to thecolorimetric route and the idea here, by the way, after you choose one of theseoptions, you can hover over it to see a description down in this area and thedescriptions are quite good.

So what happens with Relative Colorimetric is that Illustrator tries to matchthe graphic to the white point of the printer and then any colors that stillfalls outside the gamut after that stunt, because some colors are moved aroundin the interior, any colors that are still falling outside of the gamut arethen changed to the nearest equivalents. So more colors are changed then withAbsolute Colorimetric but you also get better colors out there on the parameter.Now this is the best setting for any thing that's highly graphical art. I wouldrecommend Relative Colorimetric inside Illustrator, pretty much 99 % of thetime. The only exception is if you have got a lot of imported photographsinside of your image, or you have an off lot of gradients and you really wantyour gradients to be as smooth as possible. That's when you go with Perceptual right here.

And what perceptual is going to do is it's going to bring all of theout-of-gamut colors to their nearest equivalence, and then it's going to shiftall of the colors in between in order to fill in the gaps. So basically, everysingle color in your graphic is going to shift to some extent or other, prettymuch everything but black and white.But as a result, you are going to get better transitions inside of yourgraphics, so smoother gradients, smoother transitions inside your importedphotographs. So that's Perceptual but for this graphic, I would say Relative Colorimetric.

Let's now switch to Advanced here and tell you what, just because we arerunning a little bit long after that long winded Color Management explanation,I want to tell you all about the Advanced Settings, which cover flattening, as I was saying, in the next exercise.

Q: Adobe Bridge CS4 is not previewing files in the same way for me as it is in the tutorial. All I am seeing is a low-quality thumbnail of the image, not previews of each artboard. Why is there a difference between the tutorial and what I am seeing?

A: There is a different view in the tutorial because the author used a beta version of Bridge during the recording. The final release of Bridge CS4 displays thumbnails as you describe.

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